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It was a peculiar situation. It took Toby several days to realise exactly how peculiar.
He couldn’t believe that earls lived like this. Toby had personal experience of decayed gentlemen in the sense that his father had laid claim to noble birth, whether truthfully or not, and they’d often dwelled in squalor. But his father was a sot, violent and destructive in his cups, whereas the old Lord Arvon had, apparently, just enjoyed making what had once been a grand house derelict.
Also peculiar was that Miles was dealing with it himself. Lord Arvon, rather, but Toby wasn't making himself use the name inside his head. He probably should. In the unlikely event he could parlay this into a real post of some kind, with a salary, he'd need to be a respectable servant and use proper forms. But that was the point: Miles wasn’t employing servants. He had Mrs. Whitworth and her girl Martha, who came in to feed them—plentifully, no miserliness on display—organise laundry, and heat water. But other than that, he seemed determined to clear the house with no help but Toby’s.
Toby had assumed that, when Miles had said “no money”, he’d meant it in the way rich people did, which was to say, “not as much money as would be convenient”, while still having plenty of possessions. In Toby’s world “no money” meant actually no money: no coins in your pockets, nobody you could borrow from, and nothing left to pawn. Miles obviously wasn’t poor like that, with a house and food on the table and Mrs. Whitworth, but he was definitely rather closer to Toby’s definition of “no money” than one might have expected. Since when did earls do their own heavy lifting?
Very peculiar indeed. And then there was the small matter of Miles making sure they worked in the same room all day.
That was simply strange. There was plenty to do in the house, and he’d have thought Miles wouldn’t want his company, given the awkward nature of their first encounter. Or, rather, its lack of awkwardness. It had been a very enjoyable meeting indeed until the unfortunate end, and that was a subject they had not addressed at all, yet Miles insisted on them working in the same space, day in, day out. Not eating together—Toby took his meals in the kitchen while Miles ate alone elsewhere. But as soon as they returned to the task, they were working together.
Toby had made the obvious assumption, and accordingly prepared himself to be obliging. He wasn’t a fancy man in the same way that he wasn’t a thief, which was to say, it wasn’t a vocation but he did it when he had to. Needs must. He’d fuck or be fucked if that was required, and try not to be precious about it. He just hoped there wouldn’t be any unpleasant surprises in whatever demands Miles might make.
He hadn’t been prepared for the man not making any at all. And yet Miles hadn’t, and with the passage of each day, Toby was finding the absence of demands more unsettling. Not that he wanted them; simply that he’d have known where he stood. Whereas now...
Now he was getting three square meals a day, sleeping in a comfortable bed with clean sheets, working hard at a job that was tedious and dirty, but safe, not too taxing, and with reasonable hours. And he was sharing a space with a man who was no hardship to look at.
No hardship at all. The working men's clothes suited Miles very well, especially when he rolled up his sleeves and displayed powerful browned forearms, and the more he didn’t make demands on Toby, the more Toby thought he might not actually mind them that much, especially if they were phrased as requests.
But there were no requests, no lingering looks or casual touches, and certainly no orders to suck his prick. All of which forced Toby to the conclusion that Miles just wanted him in the same room to ensure he didn’t steal anything. He had to admit, that was a bit lowering.
“You’re never happy, that’s your trouble,” he told himself.
Apart from anything else, there really wasn’t very much at all to steal. In fact, there was so little to steal, it wasn’t normal. The few candlesticks were cheap brass; there was nothing in the way of silver snuffboxes or easily pawnable porcelain or valuable trinkets. Not that Toby intended to steal, as such, but he couldn’t help noticing, and what he noticed was the house seemed to have been systematically stripped of everything saleable. Maybe that was to make space for all the rubbish.
It was very, very odd, but Toby oughtn’t ask. He didn’t ask, because three square meals and a bed was the best situation he’d been in for a while. He might not be making money but he was getting all the food and rest he needed, and he intended to make the most of that while it lasted. But he did wonder. And once you started wondering, it was very hard not to let the questions out.
Miles had been silent at first, and Toby had tried to take his cue from that, but after several days stuck in a room together sorting rubbish, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut any more. He liked to talk, and he’d been on his own for a long time, one way and another
“There’s corks in here,” he remarked, investigating the contents of a drawer. “From wine bottles. A lot of corks.”
“Mph.”
“What would you keep corks for?”
“God knows.”
Toby dumped the corks in a sack and prodded at a bundle of broken, stripped, ink-stained feathers. They felt very dead, somehow. “Quills,” he reported.
Miles ignored that. He probably already knew what sort of peculiar heaps of mess were to be found in the house. He was probably tired of it. Toby was tired of silence.
“Did he always do this? Your father, I mean. Collect...everything.” Miles had already said something to that effect, but it seemed a politer way to raise the topic than What was wrong with him?
Miles glanced up. “Why do you want to know?”
It sounded positively hostile. Three meals a day and no prosecution, Toby’s brain reminded him, but his mouth was already plunging on. “It would have been rather strange to grow up with. Or wouldn’t it? If it was normal—”
“Of course it wasn’t bloody normal. Does this look normal to you?”
“No. But then, this is a house of a man who didn’t waste anything, whereas my father wasted everything, so I’m not well placed to judge.”
Miles glanced at him, then shook his head. “This wasn’t prudence. It’s no less wasteful to put a cork in a drawer than a dustheap.”
“Then what did he do it for?”
“I don’t know,” Miles said. “I don’t know.”
His voice was bleak. Toby clamped his mouth shut, and opened another drawer. “Wax.”
“What kind?”
“Seals off letters, I think, and ends of sealing wax.”
“He might have been saving it for candles.” Miles emptied a box of yellowed invitation cards into a sack. “He was furious about the cost of candles. It was an obsession. He made his own.”
“Don’t you get in trouble for that?”
“You need a licence, yes. The fines if he’d been caught at it would have cost far more than whatever he saved. Not to mention they were awful. Foul, smoky things that guttered constantly. Waste of time. Put the wax to one side, I’ve a heap of it to be dealt with.”
It wasn’t much of a conversation, but it was something. It got Toby through another solitary lunch, and another hour’s silence in the afternoon, until Miles said, abruptly, “What about your father?”
“Sorry?”
“You said he wasted everything. But—before—you said you’d reconciled and so on. You had quite the story.”
Before. When they’d been feeling each other out with pleasure in mind. Toby would bet that Miles remembered that as clearly as he did.
“Yes. I did say that.”
“True?”
“No. No, it wasn’t. It would have been nice if it had been, though.”
He’d made it up purely because Miles had looked like he wanted to hear it. A kindly gesture. Those rarely went unpunished.
Miles snorted. “So? What’s the real story?”
“Why?”
“Because you don’t speak like a typical gallows-bird. You’ve obviously got brains and some sort of education.” He shrugged. “I wasted most of my own chances in life. I’m interested in how other people wasted theirs.”
Toby contemplated him a moment, then sat back on his heels. “My father was a drunkard with pretensions, or delusions. He claimed to be a gentleman born, and taught us speech and manners so we could pretend too. He put some effort into that. Otherwise, he mostly drank and whored and bitched about how hard-done-by he was, while his mistress taught us to lie and steal in order to bring money in. I don’t know how much of that education you could say I wasted.”
“Christ.” Miles looked startled.
Toby shrugged. “I’m sorry if you expected me to say I’d fallen from a height. Actually, I think I do quite well in staying out of the gutter.”
“No. Yes. I see that. Us?”
“I’ve a half-sister and a stepbrother. Younger. I...hope they’re all right.” He’d left them behind when he’d run. The rows had been getting worse, and after he’d been caught in flagrante and seen the naked hate on his father’s face, he’d put saving his own skin before any other consideration. Needs must, he thought, the words sour. “I’ve no idea if my father’s alive, and if he is I’m quite sure he wouldn’t want to see me again, but I don’t propose to put it to the test.”
“I’m sorry.” Miles sounded sincere. “I didn’t mean to intrude on your private affairs. Well, I did, but— Damnation.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s how it was.”
“Yes, but you didn’t have to tell me.”
Perhaps he’d been too frank, at that. On the other hand, they were here, in a room, both knowing the most intimate facts about the other. He knew how Miles’s spunk tasted; he could probably discuss his upbringing.
Toby threw a handful of assorted rubbish into a sack. “I can lie if you prefer. If I was being Edwin Harrogate, I’d have lied, because you wouldn’t want a valet with that background. But you already know who I am, so...”
“Right.” Miles sounded slightly off-centre. “Wasn’t it Harrowby?”
“Whatever. Why did your father hire you a valet, considering—?” He gestured around him.
That got a very long pause. “I’m not sure,” Miles said at last, reflectively. “We’d parted on bad terms, very bad. He’d told me not to darken his doors again. I wrote to him several times after—in the last few years, and he never replied. I wrote one last time to ask permission to come home when the wars ended, and he did reply to that, and said he looked forward to seeing me here. I thought he meant it.” His face twitched. “Perhaps he did mean it, just not in the way I thought.”
Toby looked at his face, and thought of Miles coming home to Arvon Hall, expecting a welcome. “That is cruel. I’m so sorry.”
“I thought it was cruel.” Miles sounded remote. “I thought, Christ, did I deserve this? If he wanted to destroy his property so I had nothing to inherit—well, it was his property, he had the right. But to give me hope like that, to make me think he might forgive me? I dare say he hoped, every time I promised reform as a youth and let him down, so maybe it was a taste of my own medicine. But I’d done well in the Peninsula. I was promoted to captain without purchase. I told him that; I thought he might be proud. He said he was pleased to hear it. And then—this.”
“This,” Toby echoed. His stomach hurt on Miles’s behalf, with the remembered echoes of rejection and malice. At least he’d stopped expecting anything of his own father a long time ago.
Miles scrubbed at his hair with the heel of a dirty hand. “And I can understand all that, but he hired the valet. A gentleman’s gentleman. Maybe that was for himself, except he’d got rid most of his staff. Maybe it was for me and he did intend to welcome me back in some way. Maybe he’d simply lost his mind. If he hadn’t died, or if I’d made it back to England a few weeks earlier, I’d have found out.”
Toby wanted, almost painfully, to get up, walk over, and put his arms around him. It was a ridiculous urge, but Miles looked so bewildered, so lonely. A strong, handsome soldier, with the expression of a hurt child.
Touching him would almost certainly be a dreadful idea.
“That’s very hard. But, you know, this house doesn’t look like he did it on purpose. It’s not spoiled, he didn’t break the furniture or deface the walls. Suppose he did truly want you back, that he hired the valet for you, and the state of the house is just something he couldn’t help because he wasn’t well?”
“I’d like to think that. Except of course it means that I went off to the wars while my father slipped into obsession and penury alone. Christ, I have done poorly.”
A number of questions jostled on Toby’s tongue, including What was it you did to displease him? and So, if your father sold everything, where did the money go? He was still trying out polite ways to phrase the latter, when Miles, after a moment looking into nothing, shook his head. “Anyway. Enough. We’ve work to do, and this room won’t clear itself.”